


Late To Settle

by alcibiades



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, M/M, adversarial relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 11:40:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1549271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcibiades/pseuds/alcibiades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An Inception/His Dark Materials crossover which is otherwise canon-compliant. Thank you to finch for the beta.</p><p>It's a fairly straightforward job. Arthur is uncertain why he took it, other than to avoid ennui, but maybe that's reason enough. He didn't know Eames was on the job until Eames showed up the first day, to the warehouse in Toronto, and he had seen Mekhmet before he saw Eames, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Late To Settle

**Author's Note:**

> [Mekhmet](http://www.theargus.co.uk/resources/images/1587281/?type=display)   
>  [Nimue](http://livingwithfoxes.weebly.com/uploads/2/1/4/6/21469346/1372972938.jpg)

"She's looking at me again," says Nimue lowly, from where she is situated next to Arthur's chair. He sighs; he's going over revenue statements for the fourth time, trying to discern a pattern, trying to glean anything meaningful. He would have known even if Nimue hadn't said anything, because he can feel the prickle of attention on him -- on _them_ \-- as clearly as if it were a physical touch.

He gives in and looks over, meeting Mekhmet's liquid amber gaze. The tip of her tail is twitching against the floor in nonsense patterns - amused, thinks Arthur. She is sitting at Eames's feet. Eames appears to be completely focused on the papers spread out in front of him, but if Mekhmet is paying this much attention to Arthur and Nimue, Arthur is well aware that part of Eames's attention has to be on him as well.

Mekhmet averts her eyes lazily, letting out a deliberate yawn. Nimue bristles a little, her ears going back. "Ignore her," Arthur says, reaching down to rub his knuckles against the top of her head, just behind her eyes . She pushes into the touch and glances at him for a moment, then puts her front paws on his leg and climbs into his lap, her head butting up against the underside of his chin.

The soft brush of her tail rests against his knee. She looks at the computer screen. "The controllable contribution for Q4 seems a bit low compared to previous quarters," she says. Arthur hums in agreement; she's not usually this demonstrative, but he knows that she is feeling the same vague restlessness as he is. A slight, incessant, discomfiting itch that seems tied to the presence of the forger and his daemon sitting across the room.

+

She took a long time to settle. It was remarkable to almost everyone except Arthur, to whom it felt entirely natural. It wasn't as if she changed frequently, during the last few years, just that she was never entirely sure. She spent a long time as a lammergeier, and Arthur almost got used to her heavy weight as she perched on his shoulder, the way she would buffet the back of his head with her wings if she was irritated with him. The clench of her claws, against his shoulder.

She was often a timber wolf, too, near the end, loping next to him and very occasionally howling at the moon, which made him laugh. For some time he thought she might settle as a small, neat bobcat. He wouldn't have minded which form she chose; toward the end, they all felt good, correct to some degree or another. But it was her decision to make.

Eames is one of the few people who has known Arthur long enough to know Nimue before she settled, although to say he 'knew' Arthur back then may be a bit of a misnomer. And they had not been friends, or even acquaintances, really; they had been thrown together by the co-operative dreamshare program, two of the brightest stars of their respective branches, partnered together despite what Arthur could obviously and immediately see was a conflict of personality.

Nimue didn't change in front of Eames - she wouldn't do that. She never changed in front of anyone except Arthur, those last few years. However, when your daemon was an enormous vulture one day and a dainty bobcat the next, the changes were nonetheless fairly obvious.

Eames, who Arthur found to be determined to get under his skin to begin with, found this fascinating. Despite being only twenty-three himself, he had goaded Arthur mercilessly about his age. "How old _are_ you, exactly?" he had asked, his eyes glinting as Mekhmet twined around him in small circles, her tail undulating.

Arthur remembers it clear as day. Nimue had been a bobcat that day, and she had suddenly gotten much larger - or appeared to, anyway, all her thick fur standing on end - but she was still much smaller than Mekhmet. Arthur had been ashamed at his own inability to control his blush, the hot spill of blood into his cheeks. It had made Eames smile.

"None of your business," Arthur had said, turning on his heel and walking away.

Later, as they were about to go under, another training exercise, Arthur had leaned over from prepping the machine and said to Eames, "Do you sometimes wish she didn't give you away, so much?"

Eames hadn't even looked at him, but Mekhmet's ears had gone back and her spine had arched. _Ah_ , Arthur thought, looking at the big, velvety black bulk of her. _There we are._ Because he had known from the instant he met Eames, just from looking at Mekhmet - Eames might play the affable, charming scoundrel, but underneath, he was just like Mekhmet, all sinuous, dangerous grace and killing instinct.

Nimue, next to him, a timberwolf in her winter morph, had bared her teeth in a grin, her tongue lolling, and Mekhmet had pulled her lips back from her enormous fangs, slitting her eyes, her whiskers flattening against the side of her face. A rumble sounded from somewhere deep inside her, and it grew in volume until Eames finally said, sharply, "Enough, Mekhmet."

She had stopped, clearly chagrined, but Arthur could still see the intent behind her eyes. Eames was an impeccable actor, but his iron control of himself, his face, his posture, his emotions, did not extend entirely to his daemon.

Nimue had settled not long after that, anyway, so it had all been a moot point.

+

The extractor for this job is a woman named Tollefsrud. She is a tall, hearty-looking blonde, with a handsome racoon daemon. Arthur had wanted to get Ariadne, but Tollefsrud already had an architect in mind, and as much as Arthur likes the idea of working with Ariadne again, it is a job where the architecture needs merely to be functional, not extraordinary.

It's a fairly straightforward job. Arthur is uncertain why he took it, other than to avoid ennui, but maybe that's reason enough. He didn't know Eames was on the job until Eames showed up the first day, to the warehouse in Toronto, and he had seen Mekhmet before he saw Eames, anyway.

Nimue had groaned next to him. "Be mature," Arthur said to her, nudging her with his knee, and then he had called to Eames, "I thought you didn't like Canada."

Mekhmet perked immediately when she heard Arthur's voice, lifting her head from where it had been resting on her paws. She glanced back at Eames and then over at Arthur again, standing up and walking across the warehouse toward him.

Nimue went stiff next to Arthur, looked up at him, and then paced forward a bit until she and Mekhmet were standing roughly a foot apart. She looked so delicate, so dainty next to Mekhmet, her long slender muzzle and her small paws, her smooth champagne-colored coat. Mekhmet leaned forward to give her a sniff, and Nimue tolerated it, her gaze fixed on Arthur. Arthur could practically feel the tickle of whiskers brushing against him, and glanced over to Eames, who was wearing a small, secretive smile.

 _So, this is going to go well,_ he thought.

+

Mekhmet has a game she likes to play. It shouldn't, continually, even after years of knowing him, surprise Arthur that she is entirely similar to Eames in every way that matters - she is his daemon, after all. The lengths she goes to, though, do surprise him.

It's no secret to anyone that Eames has no personal space boundaries. He enjoys using this against Arthur especially, leaning over him so that his chest is pressed to Arthur's shoulder, running his fingers over everything Arthur owns, from the diagram of traffic flow patterns, to the cheap pens Arthur always buys for these jobs, even tracing his fingers along the rim of Arthur's coffee mug, which is -- just kind of disgusting, honestly, because Arthur drinks out of that cup, and he has no idea where Eames's hands have been.

Mekhmet, however, likes to play that game too, and with her it is infinitely more dangerous, the stakes higher. She periodically yawns, stands up from where she was lying beside Eames, pads across the warehouse, and wanders over to Arthur's desk. And he's usually so buried in his own workflow that he doesn't notice her, until she's close enough to touch him, her tail twitching against his chair. She doesn’t quite do it, but it still feels faintly like being electric shocked.

"Eames," says Arthur sharply, and Eames looks up from his computer. _He_ looks almost surprised, and it makes Arthur want to laugh. Nimue is curled up, her eyes flickering between the forger and his daemon like she can't decide who is the bigger threat.

Mekhmet rumbles in her throat, and when Eames says "Mekhmet!" chastisingly, she glances at Arthur ruefully for a moment before padding back over to settle at Eames's feet again. Her tail keeps twitching, though, even as she sprawls on her side and affects laziness.

Arthur isn't fooled; if there is one thing Eames is not, he knows, it is lazy.

+

They go under; Eames is forging the mark's mistress, a rote sort of role he has plenty of practice with. She is about forty, with a sleek little Italian Greyhound for a daemon. Well-kept; everything about her is tasteful, from her short red nails to her sleek, honey-blonde ponytail. It’s disconcerting to see Mekhmet abruptly shrink to a quarter of her size; somehow it’s weirder than watching Eames change.

“Something about this doesn’t feel right,” Eames says, looking at the forge in the mirrored doors of the hotel elevator. He smooths back a strand of her hair, delicately adjusts the thin strap of the navy blue dress she’s wearing.

Nimue watches the little dog prance with what Arthur can only assume to be half-amusement. The other half is a feeling he knows too well, one that he gets whenever Mekhmet forges something small and precious in front of Nimue. It’s a perverse feeling of role reversal - Arthur doesn’t know what Nimue is thinking, precisely, but he suspects she is thinking about clamping her jaws down around the greyhound’s throat and holding him there, shaking him to let him know she could hurt him, if she wanted to.

He doesn’t want to think about what that implies regarding his working relationship with Eames.

“The forge is good,” Arthur says noncommittally. He looks at his own reflection, next to Eames’s. He’s fully aware that wasn’t what Eames meant.

Eames is aware of that, too. “No,” he says, frowning at the woman in the mirror for a moment and changing back into himself, though Mekhmet as the dog lingers a few seconds longer before the leopard reappears. His frown is more severe in his own body than it had been on the forge’s face. “I don’t think this plan is going to work,” he clarifies.

Arthur could have predicted he’d say that. And he’s probably right; forging the mistress had been Tollefsrud’s idea, and it never sat quite correctly with Arthur. The mark is the kind of man who goes through women like they’re bottles of wine, and not even the sort of wine you’d want to savor. He likes to sample them, test their flavor, and then be done with them. “So what are you thinking?” he asks Eames, his eyes tracking Mekhmet pacing in a small circle, her claws clicking on the tile floor.

“As if you’d trust my judgement?” Eames asks, eyebrows raised.

Arthur raises his eyebrows right back. “Come on,” he says, folding his arms. “All your questionable traits aside, I’ll be the first to admit that your instincts are generally good.” Nimue glances up at him as he says this, flicks her tail disdainfully, and then pretends to ignore him.

Eames looks almost -- flattered, ridiculously enough. “I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he declares, his voice echoing in the big, empty space. Arthur rolls his eyes. _Not hardly,_ he thinks, but instead he says,

“So tell me your idea.”

+

The idea is this: instead of forging one of the sea of women the mark has known in his adult life, dig a bit deeper. Back in this man’s university days, there is evidence of a more tangible connection. A girl -- a woman now, certainly -- who he had known since childhood. She’s dropped out of his life, since, but Eames thinks that bringing her back now may be more compelling than offering the mark a mystery whose depths he’s already plumbed, in more ways than one.

"The problem," Arthur says, spreading out the information he's gathered over the wood laminate surface of a cheap conference table, "is that she seems to have dropped off the face of the earth after she turned twenty-five."

Her name is Camille Adedayo. She's half-Nigerian, she's gorgeous (coffee-colored skin and enormous hazel eyes), and Arthur has no idea how she could have managed to disappear this thoroughly. It's as if she's been wiped clean from every record, ever. The only other person he knows who has this few identifying traits, this few fingerprints left in the world, is himself. And even Arthur has little tells, caches of information for the taking, if you know how to get to them. Camille has nothing. "At least not anything that I can find," Arthur says. Nimue pushes a piece of paper toward Mekhmet with one paw.

"I won't insult your intelligence or your skill level by asking you if you checked the Social Security death index," Tollefsrud says, her chin in her hand. _You just did,_ thinks Arthur, but he only shakes his head.

"Nothing," he says. "I checked newspapers, coroner's offices, public records, adjacent to anyplace she had previously lived, and there was nothing. I even checked around the areas where her close friends moved, after graduation. She's still alive, and she didn't get married, I just have no idea where she went."

"I can work with what we have here," Eames muses, running his fingers over a photograph of a smiling Camille at her graduation ceremony. "The mark hasn't seen her in fifteen years, after all, and I'm confident I can do a convincing age-up to real time. But what I can't work with..." he's spreading the photos out, smudging his fingerprints all over their glossy surfaces. Arthur watches the movements of his hands; he himself always touches the photos near their edges, careful not to mark them up, and so does Nimue.

"Arthur?" says Eames. Arthur looks up and meets his eyes. "Her daemon isn't in _any_ of these photos."

"I know," Arthur replies. Tollefsrud shifts irritably in her chair, and her racoon daemon plucks up one of the papers covered with Camille's information.

"I don't suppose there's any chance that she settled late," says Eames with a hint of a laugh in his voice, and Arthur looks at him sharply, feeling Nimue shift against his leg. Her ears have gone back slightly, when he looks at her.

"Not _that_ late," he answers, Tollefsrud echoing, "Don't be stupid," immediately after he says it. Mekhmet's tail thumps against the ground with annoyance. "So what do we do?" Arthur asks Eames.

"I suppose we'll have to wing it." Eames frowns, tapping his fingers against the photos in the same rhythm as Mekhmet's tail thumping against the floor. "I've got enough information here that, with a few practice runs, I should be able to come up with something suitable."

"Come on," Arthur challenges. "That's not going to be good enough. You're excellent at reading people, I'll give you that, but even with these details, there's no way you can _know_ her well enough to know what her daemon would be."

Beside Eames, Mekhmet shows a hint of fang, her claws flexing against the floor. "Well, Arthur," Eames counters, his voice pleasant, airy even. "Unless you're able to improve upon what you've brought us, here, I simply don't see an alternative. We've already covered that none of the mistresses are going to work, as they haven't got a deep enough connection to the mark to coerce him into spontaneously revealing his secrets. They're _expected._ And we need to do something _unexpected._ So what, exactly, do you suggest?"

"I don't know," Arthur says, his eyes dropping down to watch Nimue as she gets to her feet and paces under the table, caged in by its legs.

"We'll go under tomorrow." Eames shuffles the photos together into a neat pile, hands them to Arthur as if it's all decided. "I'll give it a go, and if you're still not satisfied --"

"We don't have time to scrap the plan again," Tollefsrud says sharply, her daemon stacking papers one by one and slipping them back into their respective folders. "If it doesn't work, you'll just have to go back to the mistress and find a way to make her unexpected."

Arthur has a familiar sense of irritation, embarrassment, pooling in his stomach. It seems to happen with alarming frequency when Eames is around. As she walks past him, Mekhmet glances up at him and says, "Don't want this to be like the Fischer job, do we, darling?" and though Eames is already four feet down the hall and not looking back, Arthur knows the twist of the knife in his gut comes from him. Irrationally, he wants to throw a punch. Nimue's ears are pinned back, her eyes slitted.

He used to wonder if this would all be solved by letting them fight it out. He wondered if he'd get satisfaction from driving his fist into the soft flesh of Eames's mouth, feeling it rip against Eames’s sharp teeth. If he'd enjoy watching Nimue tear that glossy black fur out of Mekhmet's hide. He's older, now, though, and he knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it wouldn’t solve anything.

+

Mekhmet tries an ocelot. “No,” says Arthur, glancing at her and then back up at the ceiling. They’ve been under for hours; he’s sprawled in an armchair in the hotel lounge, Nimue stretched out in front of him, while Eames forges Camille and Mekhmet runs through a veritable encyclopedia’s worth of animals for the daemon. Eames's forge is picture-perfect, down to the shape of the woman's fingernails, but no matter what Mekhmet tries for the daemon, it's never right.

"I'm sorry," Eames says, his words slightly clipped. "Are we boring you?"

Arthur straightens a little. "What am I even doing, down here?" he asks. "You could just as well have done this on your own." Nimue puts her head on her paws and huffs in agreement.

"How true," Eames replies. Mekhmet becomes an osprey and Arthur shakes his head again. "And then I wouldn't be luxuriating in the fantastic sense of utter boredom you're radiating. What a pity. Think of the trouble I could have saved us both."

Mekhmet is an ostrich, and Arthur almost snorts. "You're down here because, as much as you 'trust my judgement' -" Eames continues, shooting him a filthy look which is totally incongruous on Camille's face - "I do like having you as a second set of eyes. You really do notice every last little nitty gritty detail."

Arthur thinks that's meant to be some kind of compliment, in a roundabout way. He would almost care, if they hadn't been at this for five hours and counting. "The forge is perfect," he says. "I'm not going to argue that. And I don't know what help I can possibly be with the daemon."

"You were the one who researched all those traits," Eames says, turning in a slow circle while Mekhmet spools rapidly through a series of tropical birds, like one of those sets of binoculars Arthur had as a kid, where you would depress the switch and the image inside would change. None of them are right. "And, as much disdain as you pretend to have for humanity as a species -"

"It's not pretending, I assure you," Arthur says dryly.

Eames rolls Camille's eyes. "As much disdain as you have for humanity as a species, you are nonetheless a keen observer of human nature. You have an eye for human weakness, Arthur."

"Wonderful," Arthur answers. Nimue is watching them, and though her head is still settled on her paws, her ears are swiveled forward in interest. "Is this you trying to make up for insulting me yesterday?"

"I'm not trying to make up for anything," Eames replies. Mekhmet settles for a moment on some kind of small, deerlike animal.

Arthur looks at it. "That could be right," he says. "Or close to right."

Eames-Camille's gaze snaps to Mekhmet and he studies her silently for a span of seconds that stretches into almost a minute, and then she shudders the forge off abruptly and is herself, her tail twitching with restless irritation. "Not right," she says, her voice holding the beginnings of a growl. She's just as frustrated as Arthur and Nimue, then. Just as frustrated as Eames must be.

"We need a break," Arthur says, standing up. He looks at his watch; the time's almost up for this round anyway. "Nothing's going to happen if we keep trying to force it."

"You are the last person I would have expected to say _that_ ," Eames answers. He’s himself again, wearing that hideous tweed jacket. He walks toward Arthur, stops about a foot away, maybe less, and starts to lean down conspiratorially. Nimue gets to her feet and skitters to the side, and Arthur looks up. Eames is wearing a strange expression on his face that Arthur doesn't think he's ever seen before, and then --

\-- the ceiling collapses and Arthur wakes up, his leg curled under himself, in his chaise, Nimue on his lap. He sits up, and when he looks over at Eames, Eames already has his line out and is rolling down his sleeves, slinging his jacket back on. "You said a break, yes?" he asks Arthur. "I'm going for lunch."

Just like that, he's gone.

+

They go under, all four of them even if Karen isn't going to be in the final dream, to look at the forge. Mekhmet has settled on a small antelope that, at least, feels more right than any of the other animals she tried out for Arthur.

"Is this going to work?" Tollefsrud asks, her mouth drawn into a thin line. Her arms are crossed, her daemon perched on her shoulder with his hands in her hair.

Arthur wishes he could say yes. He looks at Eames, who is impeccably Camille, all his gestures practiced from the video footage of her graduation. Eames gives Tollefsrud a Camille smile. "We won't know until we try," he says.

"If it goes downhill --" Tollefsrud starts.

Arthur cuts her off. "We'll just have to do it as quickly as we can," he says. "As soon as Eames gets the passcode, he'll hand it off to one of us, and from there, it's all on us to get the information before the mark has a chance to realize he's not really talking to Camille."

Tollefsrud looks between the two of them. "I hope for both your sakes that your reputations are well-deserved," she says.

"We wouldn't have them if they weren't," Eames says evenly, dropping the forge. "Compliments to Karen on the architecture."

Karen, who is stern-looking but surprisingly shy and mousy in personality, whose daemon is a prairie dog, looks up, surprised, from where she had been studying the arch of a doorway. "Oh," she says, her voice colored with pleasure. "Well, thank you." She is about as far from Ariadne, Arthur thinks, as you could get.

When they wake, Arthur starts to get out of his chair and go for the kitchen. Eames follows him in and closes the door behind them. "This might not go well," he says, and Arthur has to step to the side to avoid Mekhmet's bulk as she crowds into the small room.

"I know," Arthur answers. "I know that, Eames. Are you - what? Afraid I'm not going to be prepared?"

Eames's expression is embarrassingly bare and completely unstudied for a moment. "No," he says. He's _concerned,_ Arthur realizes. "I know you will be, Arthur. You always are."

The unspoken 'except when I'm not' hangs between them even though Arthur stays silent. "Okay," he says finally, turning to pour himself a cup of coffee. Mekhmet is too close to him, and it's making him feel itchy all over. "Was that - is that it?"

"That's all, yes," Eames replies. There's a note that might be disappointment in his voice. Arthur tries not to think very hard about it, as Eames steps back out into the warehouse.

+

Even expecting the job to go bad, Arthur hadn't expected it to go bad so fast, or so violently. It had gone smoothly enough, at the beginning - Arthur watching the security cameras, the body of one of the guards on the floor next to him, Nimue an extra set of eyes. In the restaurant, Eames as Camille, with Mekhmet the little antelope-creature by his side. Arthur has been focused on them, watching the mark's expression change as Camille approaches him. "Oh my god," Eames exclaims, seeming completely unpracticed even with those cliched words coming out of Camille's mouth. "Oh my god, Charlie, is that you?"

Arthur would have put the little nickname just over the edge into 'too much,' but Eames plays it perfectly, a consummate actor as always. And for all the mark is a paranoid, jaded fuck, Arthur can see his expression opening up, like a book, and all his secrets are Eames's for the taking.

"I've got it," Tollefsrud says, victorious, over the walkie-talkies. Arthur's eyes track her as she moves through the hallways of the hotel, from the mark's room, down toward the vault.

"Don't take the elevator," Arthur answers, feeling more cautious than ever. He looks away from the monitors for a moment, peeling his gaze from their cool blue glow, and meets Nimue's eyes as she looks back at him.

"Arthur," she says, "I don't know --" and then he hears the muffled sound of gunfire over the shitty speakers of the building's security system (at least there _is_ a speaker system, he's made sure of that).

He can't find Tollefsrud; she must be in one of the blind spots. "Fuck," he says, getting up. He spares a glance for Eames and the mark, and that is when he sees it - the mark's little glances toward Mekhmet, whose long, thin limbs are folded up underneath her where she is lying next to Eames-Camille's chair. They had all been hoping that the surprise of seeing Camille would have been enough to distract the mark; they had all been hoping that the forge they'd decided on would be close enough to the real thing to serve its purpose.

Arthur remembers with a sudden fierce clarity why he never bothers hoping for much.

Eames isn't wearing a walkie or a wire; he'd judged it too dangerous, unnecessary. Arthur wants to scream at him _get out of there,_ but he has no way to do so. He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket and dials Eames's number; it goes straight to voicemail, just like he knew it would. "You're not going to get this," Arthur says to empty air, "but if you do, get out of there, and do it _now._ You've been made."

"Let's go," he says to Nimue, drawing his gun. He peels the heavy metal door open, slowly, looks out into the long stretch of the corridor, and, finding it empty, slips out.

The last place he'd seen Tollefsrud had been on the fourth floor, and Arthur is currently in the basement. There isn't any time to waste; he takes the steps two at a time, Nimue flying past him and waiting ahead of him on the landings. The stairwells are empty in a way that makes Arthur think there must be a crowd of projections gathering around Tollefsrud somewhere, and he can only hope that Eames will last at least long enough that Arthur can get to him as well. Draw some of the attention away - he’s used to making these kinds of plays, suicidal gambits he learned during his time with Cobb, or maybe a long time before that -- it’s hard to be sure, any more. Arthur's job is to be where he is needed, to do whatever he has to. And he is the best at his job.

He finds Tollefsrud's body lying in the doorway surrounded by a radius of dead projections. "Fuck," he says softly, watching the pool of blood spread around her, soaking the carpet black. She is holding a key; he pries it out of her grasp easily, her fingers not yet gone stiff with rigor mortis (it sets on fast, in the dream) and turns just in time to see the elevator’s mirrored doors open and a half-dozen angry projections, spilling out of it.

Arthur doesn’t have to say anything to Nimue - she flies at them, her teeth bared, snarling. They aren't aiming for her, anyway, focused entirely on Arthur as their daemons spring for Nimue. The mark's subconscious isn't militarized, and they shoot at Arthur with the kind of clumsiness he would expect from real security guards.

Arthur feels nothing as he shoots back, ducking into the doorway, clambering over Tollefsrud's body. He’s empty of all emotion, simply a mechanism who exists to pull the trigger and hold his hand steady against the recoil. Faintly there is pain where the projections' daemons have torn at Nimue with teeth and claws, but it isn't Arthur's pain, not really.

One by one, they go down, until the hallway is littered with more corpses. Arthur rises from his cautious crouch, and Nimue turns back toward him, her tongue lolling, her fur matted down with blood in wide swathes. Arthur goes toward her, reaching for her affectionately.

A doorway opens, somewhere down the hall, and before Arthur has a chance to turn fully, he feels pain, and this time it's real, the hot, impossible tear of a bullet through his flesh. It's his thigh; it misses the artery, but it doesn't matter, he's done for anyway. He fires as he goes down, misses, hears Nimue's yelp and sees her fly past him to sink her teeth into the throat of the projection's German Shepherd daemon, and the man falls to the ground, screaming, clutching at his own body even as arterial spray coats the walls around him.

Nimue comes limping back toward Arthur; the hurt isn't as bad for her as it is for him. In moments like these, she becomes more animal, and now she is whining and licking at the edges of the wound, as if she can keep the blood from flowing.

Arthur closes his eyes for a moment, pressing both hands against his leg. "Nimue," he says, and the intent behind his voice is clear enough. He's not going anywhere, not like this, and even three-legged, Nimue is still faster than he could ever hope to be.

She whines his name, dancing back and forth in front of him.

"Go to the end of the hall, Nimue," he says.

"Please don't make me," she begs him, her voice brittle, but she starts to back away from him anyway. He feels the sick tug somewhere deep in his chest, but it's only discomfort, not real pain. Just like it used to be. They can still do this.

She comes back to him for a moment, just long enough to get the key out of his jacket pocket, and then she starts to back away again, her ears back, her expression tragic.

"Go, Nimue," says Arthur. "Find Eames."

Whimpering, she disappears into the stairwell.

+

He's focused on not passing out from some combination of pain and blood loss, when he sees Eames come out of the elevator. Nimue is behind him, her limp worse than before, her tail tucked between her legs. "What the fuck are you doing here?" he manages to hiss at Eames, around the thickness of his tongue in his mouth. Mekhmet comes over faster than even Nimue, and her whiskers almost touch his leg as she sniffs the wound, making a low discontent noise in her throat.

"I --" says Eames. He looks stricken; he's himself again, having dropped the forge.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Arthur repeats, propping himself up a little further against the wall. "You were supposed to go down to the vault and open it, not come back here and stare at me, you -- fucking --"

"Arthur, you -- she came to find me," Eames says. He's totally, obviously dumbfounded. Arthur would find it funny, if he weren't so furious. He bites his own tongue to distract from the pain in his leg. "She _came to find me,_ Arthur, and at first I couldn't understand, I just kept asking her - where's Arthur? Where is he? And I made her bring me back here, to you. Arthur -" he runs a hand through his hair, an uncharacteristically nervous gesture. "Arthur, how--?"

Arthur feels a wave of nausea wash over him, and the building shakes. "Go to the vault," he says. "Finish the job, Eames."

"I can't -- leave you here --"

"Fuck," Arthur says. "Now is not the time, Eames. Just do it, and I'll explain later. I don't know how much longer I can give you before I pass out."

He looks up to find Mekhmet staring at him with huge golden eyes, her pink tongue darting out nervously. "Go," he repeats. "Please, finish the job."

Nimue sits down next to him, shivering, and he strokes a hand over her back, leaden as his body feels. Eames and Mekhmet turn and go back down the hallway, and he closes his eyes, rests his head back against the wall, and waits.

+

He comes awake in the recovery room at the dentist’s office, the hygienist they’d paid off staring at them, her eyes darting nervously between him and Eames. Tollefsrud is sitting stiffly, drinking a glass of water. The mark is still under, the additional sedative working on him. 

Nimue climbs into Arthur’s lap and tucks her chin under his head, as he disconnects himself from the PASIV and sits up, wincing at the remnants of pain in his leg. Tollefsrud startles a little, looking over them both. Eames seems unhurt.

Mekhmet yawns, her eyes darting to Arthur. “Did you get it?” Tollefsrud asks, her daemon climbing her shoulder to stare at Eames.

Eames doesn’t say a word, just reaches for a piece of paper, and, eyes closed, starts scribbling. He hands it to Tollefsrud silently and stands up, coming to offer Arthur a hand. “That was a cock-up,” he murmurs quietly, when Arthur takes it. 

His gaze holds a keen, familiar curiosity; sometimes he and Mekhmet are intensely alike. “Not here,” Arthur snaps irritably. “We need to go. Come on, come on.” He holds Nimue cradled against himself for a moment - she’s surprisingly light, as if, like a bird, she is hollow-boned - and then settles her back down, where she leans against his leg while he sterilizes the PASIV and packs it back into its case.

Eames and Tollefsrud are wiping down every surface they’ve touched, eradicating the traces of their presence, all except for one - the pinprick in the mark’s arm. He might know what it is, when he wakes, but by then it’ll be too late.

+

Arthur lets Eames get into the same cab as him, though it’s unwise; he did promise Eames an explanation, and he doesn’t like shirking his commitments. It feels uncomfortable, forcedly intimate, letting Eames follow him up to his hotel room. “I thought you had a flat in this city,” Eames murmurs, watching Mekhmet move restlessly around the room, sniffing every piece of furniture Arthur has touched, slept in, sat on. 

_If I did, what makes you think I would take you there,_ Arthur thinks bitterly. “I don’t know what you’re expecting me to tell you,” he says.

“The truth,” Eames replies. “Come on, Arthur, you -- I thought _I_ was doing well when I could let Mekhmet get thirty meters from me, and you’ve -- you sent Nimue four stories down and across the entire hotel complex to find me. That’s impossible.”

Nimue is still huddled against Arthur’s leg, a sad ball of soft, champagne-colored fur. He wants to be alone; he wants to take her in his arms and croon softly into her ear, tell her he won’t leave her, tell her he won’t make her do it again. He wants to bury his face against her ruff and breathe her in, because she’s _his_ , and he can’t do _any_ of that with Eames here. “What the fuck do you think gives you the right?” he shouts at Eames, the pitch of his voice surprising even him. “Where do you get off, asking me to tell you all my secrets? You think you know me, because we’ve worked together for a few years?”

“I--” says Eames. “No, you’re right, Arthur, I don’t know you at all. I’ve known you for ten years and I don’t really know you, do I? You’re entirely a mystery to me.”

“I’m not your _mystery,_ ” Arthur counters. “I’m not some puzzle to be solved, to be broken apart so you can get your _satisfaction._ God, what is it about me that makes you want to -- torment me endlessly?”

"I suppose I always felt a certain -- kinship," says Eames, almost ashamed, and Arthur looks at him in surprise.

"Kinship?" he asks.

"Yes," says Eames. "She settled when I was very young, you see. I was eleven." Arthur looks between the two of them and tries to imagine a young, coltish, uncertain version of Eames, barely out of childhood, with this harbinger of silent death treading next to him. "I had no idea who I was supposed to be, I was barely learning to navigate the world of adults, and then suddenly -- she stopped. It was as if something had been taken from me, as if she knew something about me I hadn't yet learned, and it made me -- very uncertain, very unhappy, for a while. When I discovered she could still change in dreams, I was almost overjoyed."

"And you felt some kind of kinship to me, because Nimue still hadn't settled when you met me," Arthur says slowly. "So you decided to show that by _teasing_ me, mercilessly?"

Eames shakes his head. “It didn’t -- I didn’t intend for it to be that way, originally, but -- every time I pushed you, you pushed back, and I suppose I settled into a rhythm. _We_ settled into a rhythm. It just got easier to keep it that way.”

Arthur sighs, deflating, and looks to the side. Mekhmet and Nimue have been eerily quiet, this whole time, and still. Mekhmet is standing behind Eames, slightly, and it’s uncharacteristic, for her; normally she moves in front of him, like the predator she is. “You remember the experiments the Magisterium was doing, a while ago,” he says finally. “Trying to separate children from their daemons, before Dust could settle on them.”

“Of course,” Eames answers. “Those experiments were _outlawed,_ Arthur, because they were barbaric. They were torture.”

Arthur shrugs, noncommittal. “The Defense Department was doing something similar, around the same time. Not trying to separate the daemons, necessarily, just to -- test their limits, to see how far they could go. They knew that it was possible, after all. The witches should be enough proof of that.”

“The witches aren’t real,” Eames says almost automatically, and Arthur levels a stare at him so flat that it shuts him up, just like that.

“When I was fifteen and Nimue still hadn’t settled, Defense Department representatives approached my family with interest. They had reached a point where they realized that maybe, in order for this to work, the children had to be old enough that they could understand the purpose of the sacrifice they were making. It required a certain level of abstract logic that most twelve-year olds aren’t entirely capable of grasping.” He runs a hand over his jaw, bends down and strokes Nimue’s cheek. “It was always my decision, Eames. You need to understand that. Nobody _did_ this to me, to us. We did it to ourselves. It wouldn’t have worked, if she didn’t want us to.”

“Doesn’t it--” says Eames, hushed, slightly horrified. “Doesn’t it _hurt_?”

“Lots of things hurt,” Arthur answers. “And yeah, it hurt at first, and it was terrifying. But I’ve always been...able to push past the pain, for the promise of doing something that nobody else can do.”

Nimue murmurs against his hand, pushing her wet nose against his skin. “Nobody else can do it?” Eames asks, and Arthur shrugs.

“There were a few,” he replies. “I’d hardly claim to be so rare as to be unique. No, there were a few others. I don’t know where they are now, though.”

“Arthur,” Eames says. Arthur looks at him, and he’s staring right at Nimue. “She’s gorgeous, you know? She’s absolutely lovely.” 

Nimue stiffens slightly; Arthur feels it in his leg, which is still a little sore - sympathetic pain. “When she settled, I almost couldn’t believe her, you know,” Eames continues. “I had to struggle, not to let you catch me staring at her. The lines of her, the way she moves. I would imagine how soft she must be, I’d imagine running my hands over her fur. I thought she had to feel like a cloud, because she’s so -- ethereal.”

Arthur isn’t sure what to make of it. He can feel himself flushing, barely, even though the compliment isn’t meant for him. Abruptly, Eames stands, and comes over to Arthur. His hands, palms soft and fingers rough with calluses, bracket Arthur’s face. “I thought she was absolutely perfect, because she was just as lovely as you,” he says, very quiet.

He kisses Arthur, and it is almost immediately overwhelming, what Arthur feels - some kind of dizzying mixture of surprise and inevitability. _So this is what this was all leading up to,_ he thinks, and grips Eames’s forearms, holding him close. It feels something like finally having an answer to a question he wasn’t even sure how to phrase correctly.

+

They’re in Istanbul when Arthur gets the e-mail, lying in a nest of crisp white sheets while Nimue and Mekhmet groom each other enthusiastically. Mekhmet is purring riotously, curled in a patch of sunlight that comes in through the big bay windows at the back of the house.

His laptop is resting on his chest; he hasn’t bothered to sit up much. Nowhere to go, really. No pressing demands on his time. He doesn’t recognize the name attached to the e-mail, can’t make heads or tails of the IP address.

 _I heard you were looking for me,_ it says, simply, with a mobile phone number underneath.

Eames calls it, and despite the unwanted and insistent intrusion of Arthur’s common sense, he sets up a meeting. “An architect,” he says, raising an eyebrow at Arthur.

Arthur shakes his head, thinking that he knows all the architects he could possibly want or need to meet, but two days later he’s dressed in a suit and tie, walking into a seaside café with Eames. Mekhmet curls between their feet, under the table. She’s close enough to touch, if Arthur wanted to, and he thinks to himself that maybe, one of these days, he will.

“Ah,” says Eames, and Arthur looks up, squinting against the late afternoon light as a figure ducks in and walks toward them, her hips swaying in a steady rhythm.

It is Camille Adedayo. Beside her, her daemon is a lion, his mane a magnificent sunburst. _How wrong we were,_ Arthur thinks, and he can’t help but laugh.


End file.
